Lewis - Chaotic Angels: Poems in English

My glossolalia shall be my passport I shall taste the tang of travel on the atlas of my tongue salt Poland, sour Denmark and sweet Vienna and all men in the Spirit shall understand that, in His wisdom, the Lord has sent a slip of a girl to save great Florida. I shall tear through Europe like a standing flame, not pausing for long, except to rename the occasional city; in Sofia thousands converted and hundreds slain in the Holy Spirit along the Seine. My life is your chronicle; O Florida revived, look forward to your past, and prepare your perpetual Pentecost of golf course and freeway, shopping mall and car so the fires that are burning in the orange groves turn light into sweetness and the huddled graves are the hives of the future an America spelt plainly, translated in the Everglades where palm fruit hang like hand grenades ready to rip whole treatises of air. Then the S in the tail of the crocodile will make perfect sense to the bibliophile who will study this land, his second Torah. All this was revealed. Now I wait for the Lord to move heaven and earth to send me abroad and fulfil His bold promise to Florida.

As I stay put, He shifts His continent: Atlantic closes, the sheet of time is rent.

I struggled still harder, but youd scarcely believe the strength in a hedge that has set its mind on holding a person in its vice of leaves and this one was proving a real bind. With a massive effort, I took the full strain and tore up the hedgerow, which I flicked up behind me, heavy and formal as a wedding train. I turned and saw, to my embarrassment, that Id pulled up a county with my new-found mane, which was still round my shoulders, with its tell-tale scent of loam and detritus, while trunk roads and streams hung off me like ribbons. It felt magnificent: minerals hidden in unworked seams shone like slub silver in my churned-up trail. I had brooches of newly built housing schemes and sequins of coruscating shale; power-lines crackled as they changed their course and woodsmoke covered my face like a veil. Only then did I feel the first pangs of remorse.

Still, nobodyd noticed so, quickly, I knelt, took hold of the landscape, folded and forced it up to a chignon which I tied with my belt. It stayed there, precarious. The occasional spray of blackthorn worked loose, but I quickly rebuilt the ropey construction and tucked it away. Since then Ive become quite hard to approach: I chew mints to cover the smell of decay which is with me always. Food tastes of beech and I find that I have to concentrate on just holding the hairstyle since its started to itch and the people inside it are restless of late. Still, my tresses have won me a kind of renown for flair and I find my hair titillates certain men who want me to take it down in front of them, slowly.

But with deepening dread Im watching my old self being overgrown while scruples rustle like quadrupeds, stoat-eyed, sharp-toothed in my tangled roots (its so hard to be human with a hedge on your head!). Watch me. Any day Ill be bearing fruit, sweet hips that glint like pinpricks of blood and my dry land drowning will look quite cute to those whove never fallen foul of wood. But on bad days now I see nothing but hedge, my world crazed by the branches of should, for Ive lost all centre, have become an edge and though I wear my pearls like dew I feel that Ive paid for my sacrilege as I wish for my autumn with its broader view. But for now I submit.